Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (21 page)

The five of us—Barman, Elyon, Rachmiel, Yabbashael, and Zachriel—were selected as emissaries. (Note to Gabriel:
conscripts
would have been a more appropriate term. Or
guinea pigs
.)

Lacking corporeality, we have no distinguishing physical characteristics, but, unlike the sentinels and tutelary geniuses, we messengers do have traits that set us apart. In our small group Barman is the preternaturally intelligent one; Elyon, the efficient and vengeful one (best known for bringing the plague of hail upon Egypt); Rachmiel, the merciful one; Yabbashael, the cheerful one; and Zachriel, the understanding one (for comparable empathy, Barman says, one has to look to Commander Troi from the American television series
Star Trek: The Next Generation
).

We have no gender, of course, but on Arcadia Court we became four teenaged boys and a girl. At the time that distinction meant nothing to us. With at least 3.8 million millennia of combined experience, the one thing we had never suspected we were was naive.

The morning we arrived, a number of things happened—or didn't happen—inside the homes on the quiet cul-de-sac of Arcadia Court that the observant might have recognized as miracles.

Bashaar Khan had gone to bed the previous night with a new eruption of acne across his cheeks but woke with clear skin, a fact he celebrated by working an excessive amount of “product” into his dark hair until it resembled the varnished shell of a rhinoceros beetle. Stephan Choo's mother did not have to carry her son's bedding straight to the laundry room, holding it at arm's length to maximize her distance from the sadly familiar acrid smell. Leo Costello Jr. did not begin the day by giving his little sister and brother the usual cheerful noogies, so that their wailing did not wake their parents and the family members ended up clambering into their lease-to-own Ford Escape later than usual. This gave them the opportunity to witness the hitherto mythic shopping-cart racers hurtling down Mountain Highway, daredevil homeless men who had, as Leo Sr. said, “obviously nothing left to lose.” They collected bottles and dwelt in the rough of Hastings Creek where the children of Arcadia Court were frequently warned not to go.

And, perhaps most significant, Jessica Wadsworth sat down and ate breakfast for the first time in three years. Her brother, Jason—whom we would shortly learn was almost exclusively referred to as The Wad—greeted his parents not with a grunt but with a beatific smile. This inspired his mother to head to his room to ransack it for illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia, while his father turned to Jason's twin sister, urging Jessica to take another helping of yogurt and muesli.

“Do we have any walnuts, Father?” Jason asked. “Or baked beans, perchance?”

“Oh my God,” his mother yelled from the hallway. “It's the
munchies
!” There ensued a spirited debate between the two adults about whether crystal methamphetamine caused the munchies or whether that was just pot. (“
Just
pot? Is that like
just
one more before hitting the road?”)

That Thursday was, as Barman, our specialist on world religions, later pointed out, the Catholics' Feast of Scholastica, patron saint of convulsive children. “Isn't that ironic?” But when asked in what way, Barman, being new to the concept, just shrugged.

To err is human, to forgive divine
. That old trout. We can tell you now that it's the other way around; a complex vice versa.

We hope the records will show that what we did was undertaken not as a lark but in the true spirit of exploration. In other words, like Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, we were
sent
.

That first morning the rain and the smell of damp cedar and the ozone-charged air overwhelmed our just-awakened senses. How can we explain it? It was as if magma flowed in our veins, rather than blood.

And everywhere the taste of the undiscovered was practically vibrating on our tongues.

Our first heady days went by in a blur of rampaging sensations so intense we thought we could understand how overwhelmed autistic children must feel, or someone newly awakened from a coma who finds himself on the streets of Pamplona during the festival of the bulls. But one particular day does stand out: February 14, St. Valentine's Day, 2011.

It was only our third day of school, a Monday. We'd had a relatively quiet weekend after the initial tumult of familiarizing ourselves with the young people whose bodies we now inhabited. Rachmiel and Yabbashael were hosted by the fifteen-year-old twins Jessica and Jason Wadsworth. The former was a small, winter-melon-coloured thing with brittle hair, thinned flesh stretched over pointy bones, veins crosshatched under the surface of her skin. As if they were siblings in a nursery rhyme or biblical parable, her brother, in contrast, was a ruddy young ox, golden hair razed close to the scalp, a boy whose idea of a joke was to stick a tree-trunk leg out from under a cafeteria table, trip up a student carrying a loaded tray, and gaze around in feigned bewilderment.

Zachriel was now Bashaar Khan, who was handsome in a fourteen-year-old way and knew it. Athletic and talented in the arts, he was a boy destined to make his mark. Some older youths from the North Vancouver musallah had noticed Bashaar's capabilities as well and had launched a stealth campaign to radicalize him. Fully enamoured of Western excess, Bashaar had so far rebuffed their advances.

Barman was inhabiting Leo Costello Jr., a shaggy-haired boy of fourteen who was as agile as he was quick-witted, and loved, or at least tolerated, by everyone, it seemed, save his younger brother and sister. We couldn't help but notice that of all our hosts Barman's was the most congenial. (“A match made in heaven,” Barman agreed.)

And Elyon had borrowed the body of Stephan Choo, the only progeny of an aging couple originally from Guangzhou who had given up on having children when unexpectedly blessed with Stephan. An intelligent, much-adored, and coddled boy, he had trouble navigating the shoals of childhood. Although only twelve, Stephan was completing his first year of high school, in the same grade eight class as Leo Jr., due to a well-intentioned school board initiative called “acceleration.”

Stephan's only valentine cards that day were from the school librarian and the rest of us. “You got a valentine from The Wad and The Stick Insect?” asked one incredulous backbencher, a boy with a lazy eye and a hairstyle we came to know as a faux-hawk. He plucked from Stephan's hand the cards he had received from the twins, rather modest declarations of friendship from cartoon characters named SpongeBob and Squidward. It was fortunate he didn't notice the ones from Bashaar and Leo Jr., one featuring a prancing pony with the words, “I sure get a kick out of you! Be My Valentine!” inside the stylized shape of a heart, and the other a sock-puppet mermaid: “You're my
FISH
come true!”

The heart, we were to learn, is a lonely muscle.

As soon as school let out that afternoon, Stephan was surrounded by a group of boys making off-colour suggestions about various activities he might get up to with the twins. They tied him to the neglected tetherball post in the far end of the sports field with a skipping rope and subjected him to a vigorous round of three-on-three. By the time Leo Jr. and Bashaar intervened, the boys had fled hooting and there was a puddle on the cracked asphalt around Stephan's feet.

It seemed nothing in Herodotus, Sun Tzu, or even Revelation had adequately prepared us for teenaged mores and the indignities of Elysium Heights Secondary.

Adjusting to our bodies at the beginning was difficult. No longer discarnate, we had to focus on negotiating doorways and stairwells. Bruises bloomed on our hips and shins like exotic fungi. Jason had a split lip and a black eye, and was summoned to the principal's office to be quizzed about whom he'd been fighting
this time
. Bashaar, a.k.a. Bash, a power forward on the school's basketball team though only in grade nine, found himself warming the bench. (The militant musallah youths took the opportunity to milk this: “In Mecca, true believers are not
benched
…”) Stephan had a reputation for being clumsy, so no one, not even his parents, thought anything of it when he broke his glasses three times in one week.

And all that effluvia. Sweat, nocturnal emissions, the transit of liquids and solids from one end to the other. The human body, a moody and capricious marvel. It is little wonder St. Francis called his own Brother Ass. (One of Barman's favourite authors, the late American satyr Henry Miller, wrote, “To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.” A sentiment worthy of a T-shirt, Yabbashael noted after one particularly satisfying visit to the second-floor boys' room.

The amount of time we spent behind bathroom doors did not go unnoticed. It was the worst for Rachmiel. Years of deprivation had left her host, Jessica's, digestive system as fragile as Malaysia's ravaged mangrove forests, her newly robust appetite triggering bouts of gastrointestinal distress and vomiting. And now that she was no longer anorexic, it wasn't long before she finally began menstruating. This discomfited some of us more than it did Rachmiel.

“The array of feminine hygiene products at the Lynn Valley Centre's Shoppers Drug Mart is staggering,” Rachmiel told us, eyes as round and darkly glistening as a mouse lemur's. “An entire aisle.”

To which Yabbashael, a.k.a. The Wad, speaking for the rest of us, said: “TMI, dear
sister
, TMI.”

How mystifying it is that knowledge and experience are such utterly different beasts—one a contemplative water buffalo, the other a wild mink.

Why Arcadia Court? Why not Jammu, the ancestral home of our black-walnut-loving tempter? Or Barcelona or Manhattan where our taste receptors might have been set abuzz? Why not an outpost in sub-Saharan Africa where we might have been of some use?

The truth is that like a child spinning a globe, eyes closed tight, the compact planet skimming rapidly under his index finger until it slows and then stops (There! The Bonin Islands? Wuhan? Tucuruí? The world suddenly seeming larger than large, wanderlust abruptly sated), our choice of destination was rather whimsical. And we did like the name and the way clouds sat low on the mountaintop just above that enclave in North Vancouver. There was, we admit, a waft of something compelling from a small wooded area nearby, beside Hastings Creek. “The smell of destiny,” Rachmiel had called it, rather portentously, considering we could not yet smell anything in the literal sense. At the time, we believed destiny to be one of those weasel words beloved by those with little insight into the workings of the universe.

Our fact-finding mission was to last as long as it took to discover the zenith of each human sense. Barman's best guess was four years; Elyon thought a week or so should do it. At any rate, time had, for us, never been of consequence. Now we were to be human in all respects, bound to the limitations of the species—no being in two places at once, no interventions, no miracles.

Arcadia Court itself comprised just seven houses arrayed around a horseshoe-shaped road opening off Arcadia Drive, which lay between the steeply graded and winding Mountain Highway and Lynn Valley Road. It had a neat little physicality to it, a sense of order challenged by the surrounding wilderness.

It was during our second week there that we first wandered into the forbidden woods by Hastings Creek. Almost hidden amidst the foliage, in a clearing on the east side of the creek, a soiled blue plastic tarp strung between two hemlocks caught our eyes. And from under it came guttural laughter, voices simultaneously muted and oddly amplified. “Here, mix these two together and now try it,” said one, followed by a sidewinder of a cough, while someone else gagged.

Yabbashael went first, fording the creek without even bothering to take off Jason's prized Air Jordans. Stumbling over a pile of debris, Yabbashael sent empty bottles and cans clattering in the relative silence of the clearing. Three old men emerged from under the tarp, red faced, two of them with matted greyish-brown beards, all looking as if they were wearing clothing made of sodden cardboard.

“Shit, kid, we're trying to have a board meeting here,” said the bald, leather-faced one, waving in Yabbashael's direction a bottle with a cigarette butt (or a fly?) floating in it. A decidedly human pong swirled about the men, a cloud of urine, sweat, and cigarette smoke.

And that is how we met the
genius loci
of Hastings Creek, the near-mythical shopping-cart racers of Lynn Valley. They were the kind of men the Christ would have consorted with, and who could blame him? They were the lepers, the untouchables, of this place, and so forbidden fruit to us.

Yabbashael and Barman were particularly drawn to the Three Wise Men, as they took to calling their new friends. To this day, Yabbashael swears that a dried pepperoni stick the men shared with them came the closest to what we understand to be the spirit of umami.

“It's as if they have some deeper understanding of the true pleasures of life,” Yabbashael said after one visit to Hastings Creek, prompting an unheeded warning from Rachmiel: “Nothing good has ever come of romanticizing the downtrodden.”

Towards the end of our first month, Elyon had a particularly bad day at school. When Ms. W. asked Stephan about Hamlet's indecisiveness, Elyon quoted the famous soliloquy almost in its entirety. Stephan was set upon on the way home by some future captains of industry regurgitating their bastardized brand of poetry. “Slings and arrows of outrageous faggotyness!” “To be a fucking geek or not to be a fucking geek!” and, perhaps the worst, “To sleep, perchance to wet my bed!”

“Ms. W. cut me off at ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all,'” Elyon told us later behind the Wadsworths' carport as we took turns holding Jason's gym shirt to Stephan's nose and forehead to stanch the flow of blood and tears and tried to concoct a story for Stephan to tell his parents. Plain clumsiness wasn't going to help with this one. Zachriel gently cautioned that no one likes a show-off, while Barman couldn't resist dispensing some advice: “The cool answer would've been: ‘What is existential angst, Alex?” Like his avatar Leo Jr. Barman was a fan of
Jeopardy!